Just call me "Monk"

Remember the show "Monk" -- the defective detective? My wife likes to call me Monk because I have a tendency to become very obsessive about things. Sometimes this is good. Other times, not so much. This morning I've been thinking about how my obsessive nature has affected my fitness journey.

I have quite a few hobbies that I enjoy. But I do not do hobbies casually. I become completely, thoroughly obsessed with one hobby at a time -- and completely lose interest in all others. Sometimes the obsession lasts weeks. Sometimes months. Never years.

For example, I like chess. But I don't casually play a game of chess every now and then. No, I go years without even looking at a chess board. Then, one day, out of the blue, I will remember how much I love chess. Maybe it's because I've just watched a movie about chess, or one of my kids has asked me to play a game of chess with them. Suddenly, my entire world revolves around chess. I think about it every waking moment. I renew my long-forgotten goals to increase my very average chess rating to the Grandmaster level.

I go the library and check out every chess book I can find. I spend hours every day learning chess strategies -- on the internet and in books. I watch replays of narrated chess matches and study the strategies. I practice strategies and tactics over and over on the computer. I surf the internet to find every chess-related website in existence. I spend hours on Amazon.com shopping for the latest, greatest chess strategy books and computer software. After reading hundreds of reviews, I buy two or three of the best rated books and a program or two.

Then, one day, for no apparent reason, I wake up not thinking about chess. And most likely I will not think about chess again for several years. Maybe I just temporarily lost interest. Or, maybe, I happened to pick up one of my guitars and remembered how much I love playing guitar.

What happens next? You guessed it. The next few weeks, or maybe months, is nothing but guitar -- playing guitar, reading guitar magazines, researching the latest and greatest equipment, etc.

The last time the guitar bug hit I happened to be on vacation in Maui. I had brought a few guitar magazines to read on the airplane. By the time I got to Maui it had become a full-blown obsession. All I could think about was getting a guitar in my hands. I went to a local guitar shop in Maui to see if there was any chance I could rent a guitar for the week. No luck. If they hadn't all been so expensive, I would have bought one. Instead, I bought a couple of music theory books. I spent hours in my hotel room studying my music theory books and surfing the internet for guitar related websites. I even started planning a week-long program at the Musician's Institute in Los Angeles. When I did finally get home and get my hands on a guitar, the obsession lasted maybe a week. Then I didn't touch one again for many months.

So how does this relate to my fitness quest? It's probably pretty obvious. Fitness is one of the many hobbies that I get around to every few years.

I first got the fitness bug in high school. I got very interested in bodybuilding and fitness in general. I have studied it in great depth over the years and I become very obsessive about it every few years. But rarely for more than a few weeks or months at one time.

The longest was during my first year of law school when I was at the gym lifting weights at 5:30 AM every day. That lasted the length of the school year. At the age of 28 I was stronger than I had ever been and was only a few months short of achieving my goal of a single-digit bodyfat percentage. But after the summer internship, the obsession was over.

Twelve years later, as of the beginning of this month, I had lost 15 pounds of lean body mass and gained a whopping 85 pounds of fat.

Needless to say, fitness is again my current obsession. The good part of the obsession is that I have already lost nearly 10 pounds of fat this month and am still going strong. But I do not want it to end in a few weeks or months when I become obsessed with something else. Some way, somehow, I've got to learn how to sustain my desire to be fit. It has to become a regular part of my life rather than one of the hobbies that I return to every few years.